She has seen every iteration of “Star Trek” and can recite with picayune detail the obscure plot points from incidents buried deep in the canon. She likes space-time anomalies. She admires Captain Picard but reveres Admiral Janeway. One of her favorite things is “Shattered,” the 157th episode of “Voyager,” in which the ship goes through a temporal rift that tantalizingly splits it into different timelines.

Yes, this is Stacey Abrams, the politician who drew a great deal of national attention when she narrowly lost the race for governor of Georgia in November. Now she is mulling whether, like so many other Democrats, she wants to run for president in 2020. (Or perhaps for senator. Or maybe for governor again.)

If she does seek another office, one document likely to draw close scrutiny is her book “Lead from the Outside,” which is part memoir, part self-help book (Its original title was “Minority Leader”).

In explaining her approach to politics as a black Democratic woman in a state controlled by white Republican men, she devotes several pages to a pivotal scene from “Peak Performance,” an episode from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

In the episode, Data, the preternaturally pale android with a greenish cast to his skin, is playing Strategema, a game that appears to be some incredibly complicated form of 3D holographic chess, against a humanoid grandmaster named Kolrami. Data cannot defeat Kolrami, he discovers, but he can outlast him, drive him into a rage and force him to quit the game, which is itself a kind of victory.

Abrams writes that this has helped her focus her own thinking. “Data reframed his objective — not to win outright but to stay alive, passing up opportunities for immediate victory in favor of a strategy of survival,” she says in the book. “My lesson is simpler: change the rules of engagement.”

In addition to being a policy wonk energized by discussions of health care and tax policy, Abrams is a walking cultural vacuum cleaner whose deep love of television series and science fiction finds its purest expression in “Star Trek,” in all its hydra-like glory.

“I love ‘Voyager’ and I love ‘Discovery’ and of course I respect the original, but I revere ‘The Next Generation,'” Abrams said in a previously unpublished interview with The Times last summer.

She was a little tired because she had stayed up too late into the night, for too many nights, binge-watching the newest addition to the franchise, “Discovery.” Yes, in the middle of her campaign.

She said “Deep Space Nine,” which was set on a space station, would go lower on her list of favorites because, as she said in a Reddit thread, “I love Captain Sisko, but the ‘trek’ in Star Trek is why I am drawn to the show.”

If the world can be reductively divided into two types of people represented in the original ur-text “Star Trek” of TV and film — the always-logical Mr. Spock and the charming and sometimes hotheaded Captain Kirk — Abrams, with her precision and relish for the tax code, veers toward the Spockian.

“I am still critiqued as cold and aloof,” she writes in her book, adding that her white or male colleagues with the same qualities are considered “composed and introspective.”

When she became minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, she continues, she grappled with the thought that she might have to set aside her naturally nerdy temperament — tapping into her inner Kirk, if you will — to put on an emotional, “raucous show” as she fought for Democratic Party principles.

“As a woman, would I be seen as loud or shrill? As a black person, too assertive or aggressive? Worse, as a natural introvert, would my quieter persona be seen as thoughtful or weak?” she writes.

Using the pseudonym Selena Montgomery — an homage to Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha in “Bewitched” — Abrams has published eight romance/adventure books featuring women of color. She is also a deep fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

But “Star Trek” seems to be her greatest passion.

She was nearly undone, Abrams said in the interview, when she unexpectedly ran into one of her heroes, Nichelle Nichols, on an airplane. Trekkies will know Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura, the Starship Enterprise’s coolly competent communications officer, on the original series.

As the only African-American on the bridge, Nichols was a television pioneer. (She even got to make out with Captain Kirk, in 1968, a rare instance of an interracial kiss on American television back then.)

“I had a fan girl moment and introduced myself,” Abrams said, with a dreamy look in her eyes. “Usually I do not indulge in that. But it was Nichelle Nichols. I had to do it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.