In 1967, Satyajit Ray wrote an unusual sci-fi film script about a village boy in Bengal encountering an alien. Unfortunately, despite the initial excitement surrounding the project - Columbia Pictures expressed an interest in producing it and at one point Peter Sellers was slated to play the lead role - the project came to nought. But what if Ray had made his film? Who would have played the main characters? How would it have been made? Would it have taken the genre of science fiction on a different trajectory than the one that 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, eventually took it on? All these tantalising possibilities about a future that never came into being are the focus of Otolith III, a film by British artistes Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, who go by the name of The Otolith Group. They were one of the four contenders for 2010's Turner Prize, Britain's most talked-about annual award for contemporary art for promising British artistes under the age of 50.