When you think about Welsh literature, the first things that come to mind might be Dylan Thomas, “How Green Was My Valley,” miners, sheep, and so on. Time travel and alternate realities probably wouldn’t be on that list. But Joanna Davies’s new novel “Un Man” (“One Place”), the story of a woman who travels back to 1980s Cardiff and relives her lover’s death by car accident again and again, totally does away with traditional ideas of what makes a book Welsh. She is, as she told me somewhat cheekily, “the first to write a Welsh book that combines sci-fi with horror and romance.”

Sci-fi and speculative fiction (a broader category encompassing any literature with fantastical elements) aren’t the obvious vehicles for preserving an endangered language like Welsh, the oldest language in Europe, spoken by 19 percent of the population, around 562,000 people in 2011. But the genre has been intimately connected to the Welsh revitalization movement over the past 60 years, its writers playing creatively with the language, mixing up traditional folklore with space-age hobgoblins, and imagining various linguistic apocalypses. In fact, for those concerned about endangered languages anywhere in the world — including in the United States — sci-fi is a very natural way to express the perilous experience of an uncertain linguistic future. More.

See: The Boston Globe

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