Stephen Hunt saw his first novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, published when he won the WH Smith New Talent writing competition in 1994. He's since had five novels in his Jackelian sequence published by the HarperCollins imprint Voyager, and is the man behind the hugely successful SF Crowsnest site, established in 1991. Science fiction and fantasy is big business for Stephen Hunt. Unfortunately, he says, not everyone feels the same way. And the biggest culprit is the BBC.

Hunt began to get upset last weekend, on World Book Night, with the BBC's Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, fronted by comedian Sue Perkins. As Sue is "an English graduate and past Booker prize judge, her reading material generally consists of quite difficult literary fiction", the Beeb's programme information tells us, possibly a tad patronisingly. But for World Book Night, Sue was going to investigate some of the stuff the rest of us read: "Now she tries to find out just what she has been missing and what makes a bestseller so readable."

Hunt and thousands like him could have been forgiven for thinking that these selections might have had some SF, fantasy or horror titles among them, especially, as Hunt says in a blazingly angry blog posted the same night, given that these genres "together account for between 20%/30% of the fiction market." But no.

Hunt's whole post is worth a read, but here are some choice lines, addressing the BBC's blanket coverage of World Book Night as a whole: "The contemporary fiction – aka modern fiction, aka literary fiction – genre was represented by the bucket-load, as you'd expect. The TV producers then gently moved onto the genres that real grubby proles stubbornly insist on reading - romance, crime, thrillers, chick-lit, Jilly Cooper's sex-n-shopping novels, some of the humorous stuff, with presenter Sue Perkins making it clear that she never normally reads any of that lowbrow tripe (although she might, you know, give it a whirl now, just for the sake of World Book Night). Fiction has to be painful, a little like school, she explained, before gushing all over some beauty salon clients that her favourite must-read was Dostoevsky, who is all, like, really dark and stuff."

And: "As the hour went by, strangely absent from this detailed parade of what people actually like to read was "a certain genre, you know… the unclean one, speculative fiction, as in fantasy/horror/science fiction."

It might have ended there, had not Hunt, bolstered by some positive comments on his blog and on Facebook and Twitter, announced on SF Crowsnest a few days later that he was taking direct action: he has declared war on the idea that the only good book is a "literary" one.

Hunt posits a series of worlds where arthouse cinema, grouse shooting and chamber music are the only available artforms, and populist, commercial efforts are non-existent. He then says: "I am a genre author, and I live in that world. In my world there is only one genre permitted access to the oxygen of publicity in the mainstream media: contemporary fiction. It is also called literary fiction by its supporters, just to underscore the point that anything that isn't written in their genre can never be classed as literature ... It's a neat little semantic trick, isn't it? Reduce the denotata to its root and you end up with Fiction-Fiction. So good they named it twice. Before I even begin writing my tawdry fantasy novels I'm only ever half as good as them by definition."

Another day, another genre author bemoaning the lack of respect afforded him by the elitist mainstream? Maybe, but Hunt isn't planning to let it lie. "The vast majority of novels read in this country fall far outside of the contemporary fiction genre – they very much include the three genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which has produced everything from classics by HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and JRR Tolkien, to modern bestsellers by Iain M Banks, Sir Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling," he says. "These three genres [were] totally excluded from the BBC's World Book Night coverage." He has launched a petition protesting against what he says is clear bias by the BBC against science fiction, and is asking authors, agents, editors and publishing types to sign it.

But can Hunt be right? Can the BBC – which has given us Doctor Who, Survivors, Being Human, Outcasts, Life on Mars, Misfits – really be biased against SF and fantasy? Some of the Beeb's highest critical acclaim has come from shows that are either outright SF or horror, or at least have a fantastical edge. Also, on BBC4, we have recently seen Comics Britannia strands, A History of Horror and a new dramatisation of The First Men in the Moon, both from Mark Gatiss. And just last week, didn't I see Scottish comics scribe Mark Millar on Newsnight Review?

I'll be interested to see the BBC's response to Hunt's petition. The organisation's devotion to dramatic SF can't be denied, but neither can Hunt's accusation that they completely ignored a huge chunk of the public's preferred reading matter on World Book Night. Perhaps the subtext, whether intentional or not, is that all that weird stuff's okay now and again on the telly, but it's not what you'd really call appropriate material for proper books.