You may have been there and done that already, but if you drive the resistor with a PWM'd voltage then aside from the change of resistance with temperature, the power consumed will be proportional to duty cycle. Generating a variable duty cycle from a voltage is fairly doable.
Alternately, if you can have an inner loop that's closed by even a crude estimate of the resistor temperature you may get linear enough. You can linearize a thermistor over a moderate range with the right series and parallel padding, you could use a two-terminal temperature-to-current converter, or you could use a transistor's VBE as a temperature-to- voltage converter.