William Delisle Hay

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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, [1] 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). [2]

Contents

In his mycological writings, Hay observed a national superstition against "toadstools" in Britain, coining the term "fungophobia" to describe the prejudice. [3] [4] [5]

Hay's "The Doom of the Great City" is considered by some to be the "first modern tale of urban apocalypse", [2] 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. [6] 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. [7]

Works

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Lectures and appearances

The standard author abbreviation W.D.Hay is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name. [10]

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References

  1. Bassett, Troy J. (2015). "William Delisle Hay". At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction 1837–1901. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
  2. 1 2 Beasley, Brett (30 September 2015). "Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880)". The Public Domain Review. 5 (18).
  3. Hay, William Delisle (1887). An Elementary Text-Book of British Fungi. London, S. Sonnenschein, Lowrey. pp. 6–7.
  4. Arora, David (1986). Mushrooms Demystified, A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi . Ten Speed Press. pp.  1–3. ISBN   978-0-89815-169-5.
  5. Hunter, Jessica. "The Mushroom Hunt". Synergy Magazine. Retrieved 2 January 2012.
  6. Brian Gibson,The New Man of the House: Suburban Masculinities in British Literature, 1880-1914 (2022), pp. 43-45.
  7. Christine L. Corton,London Fog: The Biography (2015), p.93.
  8. Bleiler, E. F. (1990). Science-fiction, the early years. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. pp. 355–356. ISBN   9780873384162.
  9. Journal of the Society of Arts, 5 January 1883, Internet Archive
  10. International Plant Names Index.  W.D.Hay.