American culture has always prized macho heroes who solve problems with their fists. John Wayne didn’t talk down the bad guys. Rocky Balboa settled his troubles in the ring. John Shaft pulled a gun, got the girl and looked good doing it. Sherlock Holmes — literature’s most celebrated thinker who prized his wits over his knuckles — still ended up grappling with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Even America’s premier spaceman, the perfectly coiffed, rule-breaking, heart-taking Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise, loved a good fist fight.

But Patrick Stewart was the king of the nerds, the hero who didn’t need to out-muscle the room. From “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to “X-Men,” the slim, balding English Shakespearean actor shattered the stereotype that the science fiction — or comic book hero lead — had to be a muscle-flexing, gun-toting, womanizing cad. He could be a futuristic French starship captain, his commanding voice booming, “Make it so.” Or a paralyzed mutant whose penetrating, kindly stare made us believe that, no matter what, things under his watch would be OK.

Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles at 86, and the world suddenly feels a little less sure of that.

When William Shatner’s Captain Kirk was done, nobody expected Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard to be the man in the center seat on the Enterprise-D. Reportedly, even the creator of the franchise, Gene Roddenberry, had doubts and had to be talked into hiring the stage actor.

Picard read poetry in a smooth baritone, drank Earl Grey, fed his goldfish and sent the cowboy diplomacy back to the previous generation. When the Enterprise faced a crisis, the question wasn’t who would shoot first. It was who would think hardest, and who would be brave enough to be wrong out loud.

Stewart’s toughest scenes proved the point. In the episode “Chain of Command,” Picard, who’s been captured, is tortured for days and told to say he sees five lights when there are only four. He won’t. Stewart played it with a quiet, shaking defiance, and it remains one of the great portraits of courage in television, with not a phaser in sight.

Stewart made us believe in the alpha diplomat who preferred negotiation to confrontation but was no less a hero and icon than Captain Kirk

I’ll confess I never got Kirk’s “Star Trek” and haven’t seen most of those episodes. That was my father’s science fiction. But I have seen every hour of Stewart’s “Next Generation,” and it’s a big reason I’m a science fiction aficionado, comic book fan and author. I go to comic book conventions and book expos now, but I started with Star Trek conventions, and I still order my tea like Captain Picard: “Earl Grey, hot.”

As Professor Charles Xavier in “X-Men,” Stewart gave us a mentor in a wheelchair whose power was based not only on his mind but on his endless patience and hopefulness. The “X-Men” were, at heart, a story about outsiders asking whether the world will make room for them, and Stewart’s Xavier answered with a steady hand and a warm gaze. Opposite his real-life friend Ian McKellen’s Magneto, he helped give comic book movies one of its defining rivalries: two old friends who loved the same persecuted people and disagreed about how to save them. Many fans and critics have long heard echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in their argument, and Stewart never let Xavier’s patience soften into passivity.

In “Logan,” he gave us a Xavier whose great mind was failing him, a performance that is hard to watch given what we know now about his struggle with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. In it, the proud, knighted Shakespearean actor is willing to be so raw, so vulnerable, so damaged onscreen, realistically fighting the ravages of age and yet clinging on to what heroism he could. He was ailing, and still giving us the best Professor X he could.

Stewart’s legacy is bigger than his performances. He spoke openly about the abuse he witnessed in his childhood home and was a passionate advocate for survivors of domestic violence. In announcing his death, his family’s statement recalled his work for refugees, veterans’ mental health, human rights and animal welfare, including his cherished foster pit bulls. The gentleness we saw on screen was not an act.

His velvety voice at the beginning of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” telling us that our adventures would take us “where no one” has gone before — not where no “man” has gone — signals a new future where everybody is included: men and women, the bookish, the balding, the thinkers, the disabled, the negotiators, the kindhearted, the patient, the different.

Much of science fiction imagines a humanity that has gotten past its worst instincts, and Stewart’s Picard embodied that promise. His authority came from his character, not conquest. For a generation of readers and writers who wanted to push the genre to imagine something bigger than the old model of heroism, Stewart gave us that permission.

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