William Delisle Hay (11 March 1853[1] – ) was a nineteenth-century British author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society from Bishopwearmouth, County Durham.
[4] In his mycological writings, Hay observed a national superstition against "toadstools" in Britain, coining the term "fungophobia" to describe the prejudice.
[5][6][7] Hay's short story "The Doom of the Great City" is considered by some to be the "first modern tale of urban apocalypse",[4] 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.
The story's fatal smog is largely seen by the narrator as punishment for depravity, especially female prostitution.
[8] 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.