(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 23 September 2025 in UK and 28 October 2025 in Australia.
One of the things I love about reading sci-fi/fantasy is endlessly and imaginatively expansive it can be.
You could likely say that about any genre, but there’s something about stories set in completely made up worlds that begs the author to put the pedal to the metal, push the envelope and go places that other author has ever gone before (to paraphrase Star Trek).
Ciel Pierlot is well and truly aware of all the places she could go and she absolutely and brilliantly goes there in Terms of Service which is enthrallingly alive with stupendously impressive world-building, fulsomely realised characterisation and a story that sks some big questions and offers even bigger answers.
At the start of this amazing novel, the protagonist Luzia is a dedicated first responder in Bastion City, one of the first on deck when the centuries, likely millennia-old city built by people no one knows anything and a technology that no one fully understands, gives way and parts of its higgledy-piggledy structure tumble into the abyss below.
She’s well aware the the abyss far below, and indeed the levels far above contain a mysteriously magical race called the Astrosi who are human but not at the same time, their culture steeped in arcanely whimsical logic and warrior culture that makes them a threat in theory but not usually in practice.
In other words, they barely cross Luzia’s day-to-day life and she’s perfectly fine with that.
The Bastion is old and the technology that must have been used to create its infrastructure no longer exists, and thus its upkeep depends entirely on how much they can learn about it. She means to learn everything, even if it does take her an entire lifetime.
That is until Terms of Service does the first of some exciting narrative ramp ups and she finds herself descending to the realms of the Astrosi far below to rescue her nephew who has been captured and spirited off by an Astrosi rogue and stuff of fearsome myth and legend, Carrion.
A devoted aunt for whom family is everything, Luzia doesn’t hesitate to go into a dark and strange world where she knows know the lay of the land nor the prevailing culture which, it turns out, is a million miles beyond her understanding and experience.
She soon finds herself making a figurative deal with the devil, which frees her nephew (win!) but which leaves her in service to the Astrosi who are way weirder and mysterious that even the rumours suggested.
Shellshocked that she’s never going to see her beloved family again and absolutely all at sea in a culture which defies anything she’s ever known, Luzia has no choice but to make a life among the Astrosi, some of whom turn out to be the sort of people you would want to call friends.
Her new life soon leads on her grand adventures throughout Bastion City, including the far-flung ruins known as the Fringes – she can leave the Astrosi realm but she can’t run back to her family without triggering some nasty, rather fatal, retribution – in pursuit of Carrion who, rather wonderfully, is not even close to the villain he’s been made out to be.
To give any more away would be to deny any potential readers the supreme joy of all the plot twists and glorious leaps of imagination and masterful storytelling that await.
Simply put Terms of Service reveals a mystery way beyond anything you might expecting and it keeps surprising you every step of the way with what happens to Luzia, where her life will lead and what exactly lies behind the towering behemoth that is Bastion City.
It’s rare to read a book that gloriously defies expectations at every turn and especially to have the pleasure of a novel as rich and complex and yet accessible as Terms of Service which takes whatever it is you have in mind and betters by some pretty significant factors.
Cierlot is merely content to tell a story of family a-sundered or a life derailed from the expected route or to stick solely to sci-fi or fantasy; instead she mixes the two to mesmerisingly great effect, offering story that leaps and bounds over the usual genre tropes and cliches and creates something marvellously and engrossingly its own.
And yet for all its impressive ideas and execution, and its fervent and rewarding embrace of two deftly combined genres, Terms of Service is also a novel that understands what it is like for someone to be taken from what they know and love and to have to adjust, with no warning and very little regard, to a world that defies every single thing, and then some, that they have come to expect from life.
And that is all the direction they get. Once more Luzia is sharply aware of just how out of her depth she is here, as the rest of the team spreads out in an orderly manner and begins to scan the area.
It’s this rich and raw empathetic humanity that gives Terms of Service so much wonderful emotional heft.
Yes, you are enthralled by the world-building and the way that the narrative twists and turns catch you, bery happily by surprise without exception, but you are also deeply moved by the way in which Luzia responds and adapts to some seriously untoward changes in her life.
She is not just the protagonist; she is at the heart of Terms of Service and gives it not simply rich, raw humanity but a feistiness of someone who is aware that she’s way in over her head and that there are rules and rites of passage in play beyond her initial understanding but who refuses to simply accept it all without a fight.
Luzia fights for who she and what she wants and so, far from being a damsel in peril, she almost becomes someone to whom disparate universes and people react, a fire of personhood that turbocharges the storyline and gives it not just grunt but really impactful thought and meaning.
Terms of Service is a gem – it vaults between and through genres, offers the kind of world-building that staggers the imagination and dazzles the senses, and gives you characters who leap off the page, who matter greatly and who its expansively audacious storytelling with so humanity and emotion that what could have been a massively epic blockbuster without soul in lesser hands becomes something richly affecting and completely unforgettable.