A Psalm for the Wild-Built

On a moon called Panga where AI and robots are a distant myth, Dex is an adventurous and friendly tea monk who travels the galaxy meeting villagers and townsfolk. Dex custom-blends tea fit to the folks' needs and personalities, and they confide their misgivings to the monk. One day, Dex meets a robot named Mosscap and they are thrown into a road-trip with a question on their minds: "what do people need?"

The setting of the story, Panga, is seen undergoing rewilding. The story also depicts humans and robots having independence from one another, while issues such as overpopulation and oil overusage taking up landscape are seen in the foreground. Also touched on are issues of therapy, satisfaction and finding a purpose.[2]

In 2018, Tor announced that their new publishing company would be releasing two "hopeful science fiction" solarpunk novellas following Chambers' success from the Wayfarers series. Lee Harris, who directly worked with Chambers on the novel, chose to make the novel solarpunk because "there’s a lot of darkness in the world, today, and I [enjoy] Becky‘s trademark adventure style, wrapped up in a bundle of positive SF. It’s what we need, right now." Chambers was excited to write a new universe for A Psalm for the Wild-Built and its sequel.[3]

Critics praised the novella as a feel-good, "joyful experience" with Jacob Aron of New Scientist saying that it left a "warm, fuzzy feeling inside" after reading.[2] Publishers Weekly enjoyed the "characteristic nuance and careful thought" offered by Chambers, touching on the way A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a "cozy, wholesome meditation on the nature of consciousness and its place in the natural world."[4] Writer Amal El-Mohtar criticized "moments...found jarring in their familiarity, where the thing depicted is so fundamentally at odds with the society Dex seems to inhabit that [it feels] dislocat[ing]." She found that seeing issues such as social media usage being pitted against "Dex's world of generosity and equity" was jarring, but praised the hopeful and optimistic tone all the same.[5]