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's The Time Machine (1895). Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos (1985). and Clifford D. Simak's City (1952), identifying in the latter two submerged humanisms that belie the surface anti-humanism and cosmic pessimism of the novels .