Forget Culture Wars: Isaac Asimov’s Star Trek Rule Is the Antidote to Racism America Needs in 2025
At a 1973 Star Trek convention in New York, Isaac Asimov delivered the kind of incisive insight that shows why the mind behind the three laws of robotics still defines science fiction.
File this under: sci-fi history I love telling people about. In 1973, Isaac Asimov grabbed a mic at a Star Trek convention in New York and laid out a take on Trek that still hits. He also gave Spock the kind of compliment only Asimov could. Then, because Trek never stops spawning new branches, we can fast-forward to where the franchise is heading next.
Asimov, Trek, and a very clear ethics lesson
As relayed years later by Looper, Asimov spoke at a Star Trek con in 1973 — a few years after the original series ended in 1969 — and basically articulated what we now think of as Trek's non-interference ethos in plain terms. The gist: intelligence is intelligence, no matter how strange it looks, and cultures that build themselves have a right to live without someone bigger barging in — unless they pose a danger beyond their own borders.
"If it was intelligent enough to build a culture, then it had the right to live in that culture... And no other culture had a right to interfere with it, as long as it was not endangering cultures beyond itself."
That was Asimov speaking about the only Trek that existed at the time — the 1966–69 Original Series — long before The Next Generation or anything else expanded the canon. For context, that first run starred William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Spock, with Nichelle Nichols and DeForest Kelley among the key crew.
Why Asimov zeroed in on Spock
Beyond being the guy behind the Three Laws of Robotics (and yes, the later Zeroth Law), a Boston University educator, and one of sci-fi's so-called Big Three, Asimov had a soft spot for how Star Trek handled character. Specifically, he singled out Spock as the stabilizing force on the bridge.
"The rational, sane man. And there's something very comforting about sanity, especially in a world like ours."
The many faces of Spock
- Leonard Nimoy originated the role on Star Trek: The Original Series.
- Zachary Quinto picked up the ears in the feature-film trilogy that also starred Chris Pine, Karl Urban, and Zoe Saldana.
- Ethan Peck currently plays Spock on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Scorecard for the original
If you like numbers: Star Trek: The Original Series sits at 8.4/10 on IMDb and 80% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Where Trek is headed now
Paramount+ has multiple projects in motion:
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was announced in 2023. Created by Gaia Violo, it's a live-action series aiming to be the 12th Star Trek show and is expected in 2026. The setup is straightforward: a fresh class of cadets trains to become Starfleet officers, which naturally turns their school days into an adventure — complete with the hard goodbyes that come with leaving home.
There's also a television movie, Star Trek: Section 31, led by Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou. The source material I'm drawing from says it released in January this year and is streaming on Paramount+, and also notes the reception has been on the low side. Either way, Yeoh heading back into that morally gray corner of Trek is a hook.
Meanwhile, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds rolled out its third season this year and continues to stream on Paramount+.
Half a century later, Asimov's read on Trek's moral center still feels dead-on, and his praise for Spock's calm logic is exactly why that character keeps getting reinterpreted.