Exploration of the solar system in science fiction

The exploration of the solar system is one of the classic themes of science fiction, although it is surpassed by the exploration of the galaxy, both in the number of works and in the variety of arguments to which it has given rise.

Among my favorite works on this subject I will cite the following:

• Exploration and colonization of the moon. Two novels that make a series: De la Terre à la Lune and Autour de la Lune by Jules Verne, whose protagonists circumambulate the moon, but are unable to land; and two short stories: The Singing Bell by Isaac Asimov and The Menace from Earth by Robert Heinlein. In the second there is a well-established base on the moon.

Is there life in the solar system beyond Earth?

At the end of 1981, Editorial Mezquita (a subsidiary of Editorial Alhambra) published my book entitled La Vida en Otros Mundos (Life in Other Worlds), one of whose chapters addressed the question in the title of this post. When the book was discontinued, it was again published in 1992 by MacGraw Hill of Spain, in an updated version, in a collection dedicated to science popularization, which kept my book in its catalog for around a decade. It is currently out of print.

Since then, things haven't changed much. Subsequent research has added a couple of satellites that weren’t considered in the 80s and the 90s to the list of bodies where it might be possible to find microscopic life. Of course, nobody expects to find intelligent life, or multicellular animals and plants, in any body in the solar system outside the Earth, although in science-fiction literature those things happen.