Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd

While Y Dydd Olaf is the most famous science fiction novel written in Welsh, it was not the first. That honour, I believe, belongs to Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd. The title translates literally as A Week in Wales That Will Be, but it is more usually called A Week in Future Wales. It is, fairly obviously, a time travel story. The book was published in 1957 by Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, and the author, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, has apparently admitted that it was intended as blatant political propaganda.

The plot is fairly simple. Our hero, Ifan Powell, meets a German scientist who was invented a means of time travel. Powell turns out to have the right genes to become a time traveller (apparently you need significant Neanderthal ancestry) and off he goes. When he arrives in 2033 he finds a Wales that is independent of England and is flourishing in its freedom.

After a week, Powell has to return to his own time. But he has fallen in love with a girl from the future world and begs to be sent back so he can be with her. Dr. Heinkel warns him that the future is as yet undetermined, and when he goes back Powell might find himself in a very different possible future. Blinded by love, Powell insists on going.

Of course he ends up in a frightening dystopia in which Wales no longer exists as a concept. No one speaks Welsh, and the counties that currently make up the country are now located in Western England. England itself is a police state ruled with an iron fist from Westminster, and Powell barely escapes with his life. He immediately dedicates his life to the cause of Welsh independence to make sure that dystopia never comes into being.

While the book isn’t a very good novel, it is fascinating to see what a Welshman of 1957 sees as being utopian and dystopian about the future.

The science is fairly typical for the period. There are video-phones, but they are big and clunky because they rely on cathode ray tubes like old televisions. Cars can drive themselves. Houses can reconfigure themselves using something like smart matter. Wales has sent a manned mission to the Moon.

The economics of future Wales are fascinating. The government is not opposed to capitalism, but it is opposed to anyone becoming very rich. Most businesses are cooperatives, owned by the workers. The taxation system is designed to prevent concentration of wealth. So, for example, having one shop is fine, but the more branches of that shop you open, the higher the tax rate becomes, until it is simply not economic to open more.

What hasn’t changed much is society, which is still very 1950s. The world is run by men, and it is only the advent of smart ovens that can prepare Sunday lunch automatically which means that wives can go to church in the morning instead of having to stay home and cook. Smoking is still widespread, but science has invented a new form of tabaco that does not give you cancer.

The future Wales of Elis’s imagination is deeply Christian, mostly teetotal, and largely vegetarian. Given that the author was a Presbyterian minister, this is perhaps not surprising. Most people can speak some Welsh, but everyone is fluent in English as well and people can choose the language that they prefer to use. Wales is friendly with many other small, independent nations in Europe, including Bavaria and Friesland, and it is part of a Pan-Celtic League with Scotland, Ireland and Brittany,

It is fascinating to see how current some of the issues raised by Elis still are. Those self-driving cars are not entirely independent. They are centrally controlled by a master computer system, and in built up areas they are limited to 30 mph. On motorways (there is one from North Wales to Cardiff, I would love to know where Elis thought it would go) they are limited to 60 mph. Also the government is very protective of the Welsh countryside. It is mandatory that all power lines be buried underground rather than be carried on pylons. That would go down very well around here right now.

Elis’s utopia is not entirely free of problems. There is still a small section of the population that agitates for reunification with England. They are very reminiscent of Reform, in particular being obsessed with the level of immigration into newly wealthy Wales. However, the gangs of ‘Purple Shirt’ thugs that they employ are clearly based on Oswald Mosely’s Black Shirts.

The dystopia, on the other hand, is terrible. To start with, gambling is rife. It all started with those terrible Premium Bonds. Now there is a National Lottery! And worse still, the perfidious English have forced the whole of Wales to convert to Catholicism! Oh dear…

Other aspects are somewhat more believable. Most of the country has been given over to government-run forestry plantations, saving only the coastal towns which provide second homes for holidaying English people. Unemployment is rife and the cities are full of gangs of desperate youths.

It is important to understand the historical context in which the book was written. At the time, all of Wales was consumed with fury over the plans of Liverpool City Council to drown the sleepy farming valley of Tryweryn to create a reservoir that would supply water to the city. A key point is that this was enabled by an Act of Parliament which was forced through by a Labour government, with all English MPs voting in favour and all Welsh-based MPs voting against (save for one Conservative who abstained). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Elis does not advocate full-on Socialism with state ownership of everything.

The book was re-published in Welsh in 1993, at which time Elis, in a foreword, sounds much more optimistic about the future of his country. While he saw there was a lot to be done, Wales had come a very long way. An English translation was produced by Stephen Morris in 2019, and it is now available as an ebook and in print.

Title: Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd
By: Islwyn Ffowc Elis
Publisher: Cambria Futura
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