Panga, the world depicted in A Psalm for the Wild-Built, functions as a utopian society. It is a lens through which Chambers can offer a comparative critique of humanity’s choices and Earth’s fate. Panga is a place of sustainable living, enshrined nondiscrimination, freedom of choice irrespective of material wealth, and globally respected systems for protecting mental health and well-being. Chambers urges her readers to see the clear contrast between fictional Panga and real-life Earth, highlighting problems in modern society’s ways of being and thinking.

There is an unprecedented event of robot Awakening on Panga, whereby the population of robots which were manufactured for factory work abruptly became self-aware. This occurred hundreds of years before the story’s action. Robots went from being inanimate objects to possessing a consciousness similar to human consciousness. A holistic reassessment of the Pangan way of life, called the Transition, took place. The now self-aware robots, who were allowed to choose their own destiny, left urbanized spaces. With the withdrawal of inanimate, mechanized labor, humans lost their means of mass production, and became wary of the ethical consequences of creating and using anything robotic or mechanical. This brought a close to mass industrialization, and forced the human population on Panga to reassess the destiny of their species.