After Humanity: Science Fiction after Extinction in Kurt Vonnegut and Clifford D. Simak

This article takes up the question of whether and to what extent humanistic values can survive confrontation with the deep time of the Anthropocene, specifically with the inevitability of human extinction. In particular, I focus on representations of human extinction and the emergence of sapient successor species in H.G. Wells\u27s The Time Machine (1895). Kurt Vonnegut\u27s Galápagos (1985). and Clifford D. Simak\u27s City (1952), identifying in the latter two submerged humanisms that belie the surface anti-humanism and cosmic pessimism of the novels