William Delisle Hay

William Delisle Hay (born ca. 1853, County Durham) was a nineteenth-century British author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He was best known for his mycological studies, writings on New Zealand, and a number of science fictional pulp novels, particularly the white supremacist and socialist "future fantasy" novel Three Hundred Years Hence, Or, A Voice from Posterity (1881).

In his mycological writings, Hay observed a national superstition against "toadstools" in Britain, coining the term "fungophobia" to describe the prejudice.

Hay's "The Doom of the Great City" is considered by some to be the "first modern tale of urban apocalypse", and focused in part on the smogs of London, which had famously been so bad they had caused cattle to choke to death in 1873. Three Hundred Years Hence (not to be mistaken with an earlier novel of the same title, by Mary Griffith) was similarly told from a future earth in which humanity lived in domed cities, and posited a socialist world, in which white people had virtually eliminated all non-white people from the world.

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