Here I establish my focus and rhetorical approach—literature as persuasive. Foremost, this chapter lays out the scientific but also cultural, theoretical, and religious contexts for the literary texts discussed in subsequent chapters. I provide definitions of anthropocentrism and its alternatives (“soft” anthropocentrism, ecocentrism); show my work’s relationship with the Anthropocene; comment on some of the implications of my research for the growing field of posthumanist studies; discuss the relationship of the works I discuss with scientific predictions of human extinction; and comment on popular conceptions of the apocalypse in popular culture and in Western religions.