Handyman

In a post-apocalyptic prison that might be all that's left of civilization, James Ypsilanti does something sensible: he tears apart his own door for fuel. The heating system failed long ago, and the cold is a more immediate enemy than any warden. His only companion is a robot carpenter, a mechanical being tasked with building what Ypsilanti will inevitably destroy. Together they perform their absurd dance of construction and demolition, the only productivity left in a world that ended before anyone thought to mark the date. Banta's 1962 novella is lean, bitter, and strangely funny. There's no dramatic last stand, no hopeful rebuild, just a man in a ruin, feeding wreckage into a furnace to keep breathing. Ypsilanti's flashbacks to a world before the walls fell are the most unsettling thing here: not because they show what was lost, but because they reveal how little he actually misses it. The robot becomes something more than a prop; in its patient, purposeless building, it mirrors the human compulsion to make meaning in a universe that has none. This is existentialist science fiction stripped of pretension, bleak, efficient, and quietly devastating.