ittle is known about William Delisle Hay (1853 – post-1893). As a young man, he lived for a time in New Zealand. After his return to London in the early 1880s, he became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a devout mycologist (he wrote two treatises on British fungi and coined the term “fungophobia” to describe the fear of mushrooms prevalent in Britain). Hay was a scientist as well as a gifted novelist. He wrote three novels of the darker side of technological progress, The Doom of the Great City (1880), Three Hundred Years Hence; Or, A Voice from Posterity (1881), set in the year 3001, and Blood: A Tragic Tale (1888), set in 2180, about a blood transfusion experiment which led to unexpected swapped identities. He also wrote nonfiction: Brighter Britain!; Or, Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand (1882) in which he recorded some of his experiences of living in the British colony, and edited William T. Wawn's The South Sea islanders and the Queensland Labour trade, a record of voyages and experiences in the western Pacific, from 1875 to 1891 (1893). As an author of fiction he may have inspired H.G. Wells and a few other British science fiction and dystopian writers. — Andrzej Diniejko
Works
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
Beasley, Brett. “Bad Air. Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880).” Public Domain Review. 30 September 2015.
Hay, William Delisle. The Doom of the Great City. Being the Narrative of a Survivor Written A.D. 1942. London: Newman and Co. 1880. A new, critical edition by Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2025.
Stähler, Axel. "Apocalyptic Visions and Utopian Spaces in Late Victorian and Edwardian Prophecy Fiction." Utopian Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2012): 162–211. Penn State University Press, 2012.
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Created 7 August 2025