Jay Lake And The Last Temple Of The Monkey King (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
He said he’d just run across the third of the stories about Jay that he’d written for Jay’s birthday parties. He wondered if I wanted to read it. I said “sure!” It was funny and loving and contained much of the essence of Jay. And then three days later, Jay died, just five days before his 50th birthday. No party this year. I asked Ken what he thought about having Tor.com publish the birthday story, which has never before seen print. Somehow, it seems like a good idea. Jay would walk an extra ten miles uphill to get a good laugh, and there’s no reason not to honor that in his passing. Here’s Ken’s own description of how the story emerged into existence: “I wrote ‘The Last Temple of the Monkey King’ for Jay’s birthday in 2007. I’d written two previous stories, ‘Jay Lake and the Inscrutable Alien Story Device’ and ‘Jay Lake and the Mole Men of Mars’ in the years prior. With this one, I did a Tuckerization contest for best title. I think Jay was the judge and I recall that Scott Roberts, one of my Writers of the Future cohorts, won and was written into the story as a hired assassin.
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