Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.

Humans are the first species to be conscious of their own transforming of the Earth system. This has entailed a paradoxical doubling of the human into anthropos (humanity as a blind geological force) and homo (humans as self-conscious, rational actors). Anthropocene stories pivot on anagnorisis – moments of self-recognition in which homo and anthropos become identified with each other. In most Anthropocene stories, humans attempt to resolve this paradox either by wielding geological power consciously or by renouncing mastery and receding into earthly forces. This chapter examines how Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy seeks to keep the underlying paradox in suspension. Humans are confronted with an alien entity which embodies the geological force of anthropos, but they seek, nonetheless, to make sense of their fate. The novels thus reflect on a central task of literary writing in the Anthropocene: how to (re-)compose the human.