If you were going to build a world, there are a million ways you could make it strange and captivating. Throw in some elves, a mermaid, a few robot monks; dream up a land where dinosaurs still exist or the Nazis won the second world war.

But for some science fiction and fantasy fans, none of these riches of the imagination are enough: the alternate universe they most crave is the Good Old Days. SFF is in the grip of its own culture war, with a group of authors suggesting that the recent success of female and non-white writers is proof that political correctness has spread its tentacles so far that it is now ruining stories that include actual tentacles. Like many culture wars, the specific details – orcs! busty maidens! angry bloggers with baroque facial hair! – make it seem faintly absurd, but the underlying arguments are vital. We shape our culture and it shapes us, and the struggle for an artistic voice is part of the struggle to be seen as fully human.

The sticking point is nominations for the Hugos, the genre’s best-known awards, which will be handed out in August. Anyone who pays $40 (£27) to attend the science-fiction convention Worldcon can nominate up to five of their favourite books in each category for a Hugo. The intention was that the awards would be more democratic and open to a greater range of works: nerds know how it is to be excluded from the cool gang. (Even if the cool gang here is literary fiction writers, which is absolutely no one else’s idea of a cool gang. Pass the sambuca, Richard Flanagan!)

The voting system encourages fans to feel they have ownership of the awards and to treat them as a barometer of genuine, grassroots opinion. As 2014 winner Kameron Hurley put it: “They historically rewarded popular work, set in the kinds of old, colonial, dudes-rule-everything universes that my work explicitly challenges.”

But times are changing, and there are complaints that the Hugos are being used “as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert under-represented minority or victim group here) or because a work features (insert under-represented minority or victim group here) characters”.

That sentiment comes from US SFF author Brad Torgersen, who is a Mormon, a libertarian and a gun-rights enthusiast, and as such feels that the current trends in SF do not favour the types of books he personally enjoys. In February, he suggested a slate of works readers could vote for to ensure the Hugos had relevance outside “rarefied, insular halls of 21st-century Worldcon ‘fandom’”. The slate is called Sad Puppies, because fellow author Larry Correia once said that not having his books nominated for the “snooty and pretentious” awards “made puppies sad”.

So far, so niche. But because this is the internet, someone always has to pitch in and turn the hostility up to 11. Enter a man called Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day, with his own slate called Rabid Puppies. Vox Day is even less polite about minorities and “victim groups”: he claims that marital rape is an oxymoron, because “marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis”, and that race is linked to IQ (you can imagine which way). He also opposes women’s suffrage, saying “the women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilised western society and little girls”. He’s so bigoted it’s perversely refreshing. Oh right, he actually said that, you think. Bloody hell.

The result of this perfectly legal manipulation is that, in the words of Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, “The Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired.” The shortlist is dominated by the Puppy slates, the hills are alive with the sound of angry Tumblrs, and two authors have withdrawn their books from consideration rather than be associated with the campaign.

If all this still seems like a storm in a dragon-shaped teacup, then look at the bigger picture. This is just the latest skirmish in a culture war that has been raging, in one form or another, for at least 30 years. It was called identity politics in 1980s, “political correctness gone mad” in the 1990s, and Gamergate last summer. It lay behind the gasps of fake outrage about Emily Thornberry’s recent picture of a flag and a white van, and it is what emboldened Nigel Farage to claim that the handpicked, balanced audience at the challengers’ debate on Thursday was riddled with leftwing bias.

It works like this: if you worry that you might be accused of an -ism, get your defence in first by asserting that the accuser is an envoy of an ivory tower elite and you are merely a tribune of the people. As it works for Farage, so it does for Vox Day. Yes, you might have gone to private school, worked as a commodities trader and have been a member of the European parliament since 1999, but you are an outsider! Yes, you might have got nine titles from your own tiny Finland-based publishing house on the Hugos shortlists, but that’s only because you are trying to seize back science fiction from a self-serving clique!

Over and over again, we see the mechanism by which power re-asserts itself when challenged. With a gymnastic leap, those on the defensive become the underdogs, cruelly repressed by the BBC, feminists, people from Islington, some nebulous “elite” or the suggestion that sometimes a female character in a videogame might wear a decently supportive bra.

The debate demands onlookers accept one of two contradictory premises, so there is little room for nuance and the argument never runs out of fuel. Is Farage a truth-teller or a race-baiter? Was Thornberry a metropolitan snob, or was the England flag itself a type of dogwhistle? Are the Hugo awards in thrall to a politically correct cabal, or simply making an effort to remedy an ingrained injustice? Whether it’s videogames, science fiction or Westminster politics, the underlying struggle for victim status is the same. And once you notice, it’s downright eerie to hear the same arguments – about “out-of-touch elites” who don’t connect with the tastes of “real people” – coming from the leader of Ukip and a guy who wrote a book called Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy.

There is no single answer and, at least in the case of the Hugo awards, it is not in the extremists’ interests to find one. Vox Day has built a small internet army on his manufactured grievance, and he won’t let it go lightly. If SFF fans vote to give “no award” in the categories where Rabid Puppies candidates dominate, he has threatened to ensure that the awards are never given again. It is a supremely self-interested move. Politicising the Hugos to such a degree certainly doesn’t help the nominees themselves, because authors on his slate risk being informally blacklisted by the rest of the community. Who wants to read a fantasy story endorsed by a bigot?

The only comfort here for progressives is that these spasms prove their side’s ideology has ultimately triumphed. The basic point has been conceded, with both sides acknowledging that cultural marginalisation is a real affliction that must be countered. They just disagree on who is really marginalised.

Puppygate will force a reckoning in the SFF world, just as Gamergate did for videogames, and next year the debate will simply mutate into another form. “If you want a picture of the future,” as Orwell didn’t write in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “imagine a finger pressing refresh on an angry blogpost – for ever.”