Andre Lichtenberger

The Children of the Crab Andre Lichtenberger

In the midst of World War I, German and French explorers discover a vast, mysterious Pacific island where they encounter a race of "missing links" that time forgot. But they also bring to that peaceful utopia the ravages of the bloodiest war ever fought. The Children of the Crab (1921) shares some common themes with Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic The Land That Time Forgot (1918). It depicts a lost Polynesian island culture, halfway between nature and civilization, made up of intelligent anthropoids in an intermediate state between humans and apes. This philosophical fantasy is no less timely now than it was in 1921, especially as humanity deals with the ecological holocaust, the continuation and intensification of which the story predicted.