Twinkle Khanna: I've been ready for AI for 30 years

Twinkle Khanna's latest book is titled 'Welcome to Paradise'.

Twinkle Khanna's first book since getting a master's in fiction writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, aged 48, is a compendium of stories about death and grieving. Titled 'Welcome to Paradise', the book presents characters having conversations about euthanasia and cremations and burials - of course, with a lightness and humour that we've come to expect from Mrs Funnybones.

Indeed, that lightness carries forward into an early December conversation on Zoom as Khanna jokes that she and her son almost landed up at the same university at the same time. "I didn't want to go to university with my son; and I'm sure he didn't want to go to school with his mom. Thankfully, we each got our first option," she laughs.

Edited excerpts from the interview about 'Welcome to Paradise', reading science-fiction, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI):

Why is the book called Welcome to Paradise, despite the ominous-looking cover?

I wanted the title to be subversive. None of these stories have what you would call a happy ending, because life itself doesn't have a happy ending. At the end of it, if you follow any story, you die. So happiness or paradise are the few chosen moments that kind of balance out the scales. Like Jane Hirshfield - who's mentioned in the book - said, and I am paraphrasing, such few grains of joy and still the scales balance. I thought that was interesting. It's not like we have happy lives, but the few happy moments we have, fill our lives with purpose and meaning and we go on, and we don't want to stop living despite all the tragedy around us.

There's death and grieving in all of the stories in the book. How did that happen?

I didn't start with thinking about grief, to be honest. I just started with the stories I wanted to tell. Perhaps I am at a stage in my life where (I am thinking) if I am lucky, I'll live to a decent 85 years. Now, 50 years are gone. And then if I calculate the 8 hours I am going to sleep and I remove that, till 85, I lose another 11 years. Which means that I have a good 20 years where I am alive and awake. On a more serious note, I am at a stage where a lot of people that I have loved are gone. My friends are losing parents, I have lost a parent. My grandparents are gone. You see a lot of this happening and probably without me realizing, it seeped into my mind and on to paper. But I didn't deliberately set out to write about grief.

Your protagonists in this book are almost always older women. Why is that?

They aren't almost always older women, the older women just take over and shine. If you see 'Let's Pretend', the protagonist is in her 30s but it's just that Bhua became such a vibrant factor that she took over and you feel like she's the protagonist. Or if you see 'Welcome to Paradise', Garima is the protagonist but her mother takes over.

Partly it is that I am very interested in older people. There's a certain richness and a certain texture. They've experienced so much, they've seen life, their minds are much more interesting. But society tends to treat them as invisible.

Does humour come naturally to you?

I think I see things in a pragmatic manner, and that is funny because life is funny. I have never taken myself too seriously, and my sense of humour comes from that space. Is the glass half empty or half full? I don't know, because I can't see without my glasses. Even in this book, though the topics are sombre, there is a lightness and buoyancy because that is the person that I am.

My mother says the reasons I have 40 ligament tears in my ankle is because I am constantly twisting my foot to put it in my mouth.

40 ligament tears? How did that happen?

I have 40 ligament tears in my left leg and 10 on the right. Growing up, I think I read so much because I was always laid up in bed with a pillow under my leg. I would just read, and I still primarily read, science fiction. I couldn't always walk to the bathroom without limping, but within the book I could leap across galaxies. It really enriched my inner world.

What were you reading, and where?

My love has always been science fiction. My uncle used to read a lot of science fiction, and he would leave them lying around. I read a lot of (Isaac) Asimov and Philip K Dick and Arthur C Clark, and I started reading all this by the time I was 14-15.

And today, at least for the last 10 years, every night before sleeping, I read four science fiction short stories. I am poor sleeper, so if I wake up at 3am, I'll again read half a story and fall asleep. I don't even consider it reading, because it's relaxing my brain to sleep. But it's a habit that has stayed with me.

If you are asking me about my heroes, I guess Alice Munro - I did a paper on the way she navigates time through her stories. Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood and Frederik Backman. I read A Man Called Ove, and it was so simple. Right now Ted Chang is my favourite because it's science fiction, and the world-building is at a level that is so immersive.

Where are you reading these short stories?

I read them in these magazines called Lightspeed and Tor and Clarkesworld.

Do you plan your own stories down to the last detail?

I am a list maker, note-taker, diagram graphical person by nature. For everything in my life, there is a list. Everything will have a sort of three-part structure. When you're writing, you throw that out. But it's nice to have that preparation.

In 'Welcome to Paradise', you write about some difficult topics, such as Euthanasia. Did you have any misgivings about how it would be received?

I wasn't trying to give a conclusive answer to the Euthanasia debate. I was raising a question about the difference between surviving and living, and at a substratum, trying to explain our dilemma about death. I have an innate curiosity towards the world - I am not someone who has the answers, but I am someone who would like to know the answers.

What does it mean to you to be creating at a time when generative AI is getting pretty good, and we're also talking about artificial general intelligence? Is that something that worries or excites you?

Because I have been a science fiction reader, this is a world I have been prepared for for more than 30 years. I've been waiting for this to happen. In every story I ever read, humanity had only destruction at the end. And there were three reasons why it (humanity) would be eradicated: disease, climate change or AI.

A lot of things that I read about in books have happened - I never thought they would happen. Even EM Forster had a story titled "The Machine Stops", which had virtual meetings.

I always thought I had an advantage over everyone else because I had been prescient. But I guess I had better start reading something else, because now I am on par with everyone else.