You expect a lot of things from Warren Ellis: to be frustingly and amazingly mind-fucked; to have your view on an aspect of the real world distorted to the point of both miscomprehension and epiphany; for every character who can smoke to smoke—like, smoke a lot. What you don’t expect is to be bored. Anna Mecury was perfectly fine and perfectly generic. It read like third rate Rucka, and even third rate Rucka is not bad Rucka. It’s the story of a spy (a space spy, because why not?) who gets caught behind enemy lines on a poorly defined planet. It’s told in that classic and classicly overused style of showing the action first and then giving the back story. This all would be perfectly acceptable for any other writer, but Ellis’s work is now haunted by that thumping thought as you read through another page of mediocrity—couldn’t he have put this idea away and given us another few pages of Fell or Planetary? I don’t know whether that’s fair, but when reading Ellis at this point it can’t be avoided; it’s just what you expect.