Whenever we mention speculative fiction writers, what comes to mind must be Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Higashino Keigo, etc., even people like me who have not touched speculative fiction at all have "Edgar Allan Poe Dark Stories", "Sherlock Holmes Detective Collection" (it is really the book of enlightenment that I read speculative fiction, but it is really only enlightenment), "Murder on the Orient Express", "White Night" and other books, which have been successfully made into film and television works and can be further circulated.
For Chinese literature, speculative literature always seems to be an outsider, paper literature developed and popular era "Reasoning" and "Reasoning World" used to be the most influential reasoning magazines in China, but only survived for more than a decade, in recent years only online articles are constantly updating speculative fiction. As for the speculative literary review, there are even fewer, if you do not see today's "Feast of Reasoning", you would not have thought that the Speculative Book Review has also been published in various reasoning magazines. China's cultural tradition always seems to give people a kind of novel that does not like to solve story puzzles by reasoning (mostly to find the murderer), usually the story contains homicide and detective, and some do not use homicide as the main plot direction, such as finding lost objects or solving the mystery of strange events. A type of detective novel, but it is not always the detective who solves the mystery. In comparison, I'm afraid that speculative fiction is far less popular than the script (this is a lot of books that are very popular to play, and my brain is not enough).
In this context, Zhang Xuan (Master of South China Agricultural University, mainly studying the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties and literary criticism) has compiled his speculative literary criticism articles in recent years into a collection, and strives to unify his literary criticism concept in the book, that is, in China, the barren land of reasoning, more people can devote themselves to the creation of speculative novels, and literary critics should also actively promote the development of speculative literary criticism, and comment on speculative novels in a rational, sober, and speculative way. Gradually bring speculative literary criticism into the mainstream literary criticism category (it may be a bit big).
Zhang Xuan himself is constantly excavating the fertile soil of Chinese speculative fiction and looking for clues and traces of the introduction of historical speculative literature into China, and the excavation of Mr. Cheng Xiaoqing's works is one of the biggest contributions. The opening chapter "The Legacy of the Master" introduces in detail the contributions of Cheng Xiaoqing and other Detective Novelists of the Republic of China, and Cheng Xiaoqing's life is to spare no effort to translate and popularize the culture of detective reasoning. Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Van Dyne, Ellery Quinn and many other excellent works were translated by him, and the quality and quantity of his translations were greatly appreciated even by Edogawa, who had the "father of Japanese detective novels"; in addition, he also founded a series of excellent magazines and periodicals such as "Detective World", "Coral", and "New Detective" under the influence of that grand literary trend. Under his influence, the earliest batch of detective novelists in China were born, and Sun Zhihong, Yu Tianyi, Lu Yuan'an, Zhang Biwu and others appeared on the historical stage of detective novels.
It is also based on Zhang Xuan's research and understanding of the budding of early detective novels that her article "Sherlock Holmes in China": Cheng Xiaoqing's Translation and Creation" was also successfully published in the "Beijing News" "Book Review Weekly" (the original text is https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1670165876262081293&wfr=spider&for=pc here). Her way of commenting is more of a "scholar-type article", many of which are written in strict accordance with the mode of literary criticism, various summaries, exploration of techniques, understanding of characters, comparative analysis of the differences in TV series, movies and other remakes, and finally sort out a complete line of work, very clear and concise to describe the strengths and differences of the work.
Many articles can split her thinking, and then better grasp the complex characters and storylines in the book, the interest of speculative fiction is also tasted in this analysis, and her erudite knowledge and the unique literary nature of the commentary also enrich the content of the literary review articles, which is a very good collection of reviews.