AQ Saga is a narrative talisman against pain channeled from a future or fictive incarnation of its author. Nautically set, it digests and redirects an armada of points of reference salted in new identity: cybernetics, Philip Jose Farmer’s fictions, the Shaver Mystery, neurology, a pair of early 20th century composers, CIA mind control via cultural programming, sea monsters, boatbuilding and sailing, and the so-called lunar sprite. 

It can be read as a comic-tragic-epic poem, a coded fanfictional anime paranoiopera, or a hypersigil for the cure of a disorder of the trigeminal autonomic cephalgia type. 

Ben Roylance operates Apport Used Books. He is the author of A Talking Skull (the holon project, 2022; Peace Isn't Luck audio edition, 2021) and The Horoi Control System (forthcoming). He lives in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. 

“Cephalgia is a poem obscuring the reality of a process one masterpiece at a time, so try to take meds of poet Roylance’s transmitted AQ saga installment, try to ground, and you will have preferred to act in the suspension as you would have differently wished, unknowing that few texts could provide such suspension, such plenum consistency to the ball collections within every near-gas or fluid, with lots of new ideas about health, where “pain” is uttered nearly once per page.”—Zan de Parry

“Ahoy, mateys! Through our captain Ben Roylance (the author or channeler rather), the reader (the first mate) psi-sails the tides of a neural network of one meta-sigil bio-avatar, AQ. I once met AQ in a rainy alleyway. I was not regaled in tales of the sloop, Steppin’ George, demons, psi-nautical seances, E. Karl Charcoal, the Erythroprosopalgian, AQ-as-ship-as-brain, blood computers, the AQalgian, MT Sockett, or Apollo or directed energy weapons. AQ instead handed me a manuscript, said read it, then only could I climb aboard the good ship Roylance to feel the wash of the ocean around me, each oceanic spray a reference: sword-and-sandal films, swashbuckling tales, heroic/comedic ribaldry, rhetoric on uppers, word-a-minute worldbuilding serial pulp paperbacks, old English poets, sitting and waiting in an empty bookshop that you own, the depths of conspiratorial publishing, the joy of reading, or the long poem. I reached out to AQ after I finished reading the book to ask more about what I just read, and I heard: ‘ I don’t understand what you want.’”
—Ed Steck

Designed by J. Gordon Faylor
5.75 × 8 in.
98pp

979-8-9891124-0-1

$15 + $4 shipping