What connects the writer Brian Aldiss, the god Ganesh and sci-fi art of the 1970s? Bob Fowke looks at intriguing connections between Tamil literature, Hindu cosmology and speculative fiction, using three paintings published in Alien Landscapes in 1979 to illustrate Brian Aldiss’s short story  Hothouse, a cataclysmic tale of environmental change, first published by Faber in 1962. The paintings were executed on commission in southern India in unusual circumstances when the artist had time to consider his subject matter in detail, a luxury not usually afforded to busy sci-fi artists of that period. 2025 is the centenary of Brian Aldiss’s birth.