Science fiction in libraries during the 1950s and 1960s has many imaginative tales based on space and planets.
A story about mining on Mercury. Solo miners are are found frozen to death. It is traced to black, sloth-like creatures clinging to the mine ceiling which drop down on miners and suck away their body heat.
A story about mining asteroids. Similar to a Wild West story. A boy and his grandfather are mining an asteroid and need to get back to home base on the big asteroid, but find that the oxygen is low. Once mounted on the snowmobile-like rocket and thrusted in the right direction, the grandfather is able to go into a sleep state that consumes less oxygen, giving the boy enough to get them both back alive.
Boy Scouts' Boys Life has a short story about space scouts that find the alien space station that has kidnapped some other scouts. The scouts gain entry and recover their comrades.
Men land on Mars and find vegetative life. After observing one variety in a crater, they find the life form is moving slowly. One man cuts into a specimen and all the men are shocked to hear the plant scream. Later, one solitary man disappears. The others find that he has been abducted by some fast-moving Martians. They catch up to the abductors as they enter an underground dwelling. The abducted man is being placed in the large oral cavity of the king plant-like life form. The man is not harmed; the king has a cultural memory of when Martians were able to digest, and the king is trying out the old carnivorous practice.
A sci-fi novel that is like the 2010s Dual Survivor TV programs. Planet X drifts into the Solar System. Astronomers find that it will pass near Earth. Planet X is large and has powerful gravity. Astronomers know for months ahead of time that when Planet X passes near Earth, Earth will be slingshoted out of the Solar System. Earth will become Planet Y! There is practically nothing that general populations can do to prepare. When the close approach by Planet X happens, there is a sudden acceleration that is like an earthquake. It is called the Big Jerk. The few survival structures that have been built are wrecked. Survivors watch the Sun week by week and see that the Earth is receding, out of the Solar System. It grows cold all over the Earth.
One family in a city sets up a rudimentary shelter before it gets too cold. They set up poles to make a framework. They drape many blankets over the poles. The atmosphere grows so cold that nitrogen and oxygen snow out onto the ground. The family finds that oxygen ice can be found at a certain layer, and they make space suits out of plastic so they can bring in oxygen ice twice a day. They have a little fire that they put the oxygen bucket next to, and they breathe pure oxygen. The oxygen pressure inside their blanket shelter is enough to sustain them.
When they explore derelict buildings around their shelter, they find canned food. They look into apartments and find blackened, shriveled corpses under blankets.
They live for years. They have children.
One day, they have a sense of dread. They think some alien life form is nearing them. They hear blankets of their shelter rustling. They look with dread as a figure enters their dim living space. The figure calls out, in English! It is a man! The one man is followed by others. It is a rescue party! They survived the Big Jerk in the Southern Hemisphere and they have been sending out search parties, looking for hot spots across the frozen Earth. The family is rescued.
A similar novel in 1933, When Worlds Collide. In this story, Planet X is on a collision course with Earth. Two years of warning give time for space ships to be built. Exiles are selected and leave in the space ships. From orbit, they see Planet X collide with the Earth. After some time, the conglomerate planet is seen to have a stable climate. But it is much more like Planet X than Earth. One by one, the space ships land in different zones and find the planet to be habitable. But the atmosphere isn't blue, it is green! The Communist colony assaults the free colonies. Things work out in the end. A new season starts, and the survivors find that a green rain is falling. After a couple of days, the Sun comes up and the survivors find that the sky is now blue. The green color had been some seasonal substance drifting in the atmosphere.
A 1951 movie takes this story onto the silver screen.
When Worlds Collide is a good novel. There is some physics reality that the novel ignores. Here is how it goes. Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 (formally designated D/1993 F2) was a comet that broke apart in July 1992 upon close encounter with Jupiter. The fragments continued in orbit around the sun and came back toward Jupiter, colliding with Jupiter in July 1994. Astronomers calculated the energy that would be liberated by the collision and found that it was awesome. All of the comet would vaporize, even though there is no hard surface anywhere on Jupiter. Just the collision into the atmosphere of Jupiter would vaporize all of the comet. The collision was on a side of Jupiter that was hidden from Earth, so the actual collision was not seen. But the collision was so violent that the light from the shock waves was calculated to be so bright that it would flash a lot of extra light onto Jupiter's moons, and in fact extra light reflected from the moons and was observed. After some hours, the swift rotation of Jupiter brought the collision points (several, one for each comet fragment) into sight of Earth. The collision points were found to be dark, and they persisted for some time.
Knowing about the tremendous energy from this type of collision, and seeing TV programs about dinosaur extinction from the Yucatan ancient asteroid collision, I have known for years that a planet-to-planet collision would be a fantastic demolition. Even a tiny planet colliding onto Earth would vaporize all water and melt all the surface of Earth! So I know that When Worlds Collide was an unrealistic story. If you search the World Wide Web for images of planets colliding, you rarely see an artist conception that would be accurate: the smaller planet's atmosphere and surface that faces the larger planet gets pulled off and falls onto the larger planet, shortly before the main collision. If the smaller planet has a hot core, then when the fragments of surface are pulled off, it exposes the incandescent innards of the small planet. That is mighty dramatic. But as soon as the fragments of small planet fall into the atmosphere of the larger planet, fantastic shock waves happen and all collision areas turn into plasma. Then the main bulk of the smaller planet falls onto the larger planet during about 30 minutes, and the planets are obscured by great, blinding-hot clouds of debris. The whole mess, probably a whirling, amorphous, writhing region, orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit. Billions of tons of debris are flung out to other planets in the system, over centuries, and each substantial impact onto other planets is so violent that the other planets' surfaces are melted. This is what physics says would really happen, and the reality is far more terrifying than any old novel was.
The famous radio program from 1938, War of the Worlds, was at a time when Percival Lowell (died 1918) had popularized intelligent life on Mars. The story was that Mars was drying up, and the Martians gazed at the green Earth and desired to colonize it. A movie was made of the story in 1953, and a later production was in 2005. The 1953 movie was for JE a scary movie when I saw it about 1963.
Four Earthlings happen upon a saucer UFO. The door is open, and no one is inside. They snoop around in the UFO. Suddenly, the hatch swings shut and the engine powers up. They are pressed down to the floor by G forces. Through portals, they see the Earth receding. Somehow, the UFO has taken off, leaving the aliens who came in it stranded on Earth. For days, the craft plunges through space. The Earthlings have nothing else to do but open drawers and inspect cavities. They find a pantry. One of them secretly tries various foodstuffs. He survives one toxic food but finds most of it edible, and the other Earthings are glad to eat and drink. (No mention of toilet.)
After weeks, the craft reaches a planet that orbits an alien star. The craft lands at an airfield, or spaceport. The hatch opens and the Earthlings emerge to find the atmosphere breathable. An old robot drags a hose to fill the fuel tank. The fuel is liquid and is corrosive. The Earthlings try to communicate with the robot but the robot is unresponsive. Before the fueling is complete, the Earthlings re-enter the craft so they won't be left behind. The craft heads back into space for its next destination.
One of the Earthlings snoops around the bridge of the craft. There are many hatches and compartments. He uncovers metal cannisters that have coils of metal wire, each coil bearing indentations that are some kind of code. He studies the coils for weeks and finds a way to interpret them. He finds one coil that has a destination of Earth. He is able to feed the coil into the navigation equipment of the craft. The craft turns around and heads toward Earth. Another refueling stop is necessary, though, and it is the same stop they had been at before. But from appearances, a lot of time has passed, because the robot is now too old to move. (The implication is that their craft has travelled nearly the speed of light, and the Earthlings have aged only slightly while the planets and stars have aged by centuries.) The craft is alongside a reservoir of fuel, and the fuel seems to be OK, but the robot can't do the fueling. The Earthlings look around and find odds and ends with which to open a port of the reservoir and dip out enough fuel for the craft. They take off and return to Earth. I don't remember if their return to Earth is in a future time, as they have been near the speed of light for a long time.
A class of space cadets completes classroom instruction and prepares for a space practicum. They are organized into teams of a dozen each. They assemble at the portal (in future movies, the portal is a star gate or worm hole). One cadet has dressed himself in a space suit, ready for any environment, even the vacuum of outer space. (He is disqualified, he should have known better than to lack trust in his practicum instructor.) The rest of the team goes through the portal and finds themselves on an alien planet with breathable air, edible plants, and moderate temperature. During their first night, they look to the stars and find no trace of the constellations that Earthlings see, so they know they are a long way from the Solar System. They complete their practicum activities and are ready to be returned to Earth, but no transport happens. After weeks, they decide something has happened to interfere with their return to Earth, and they think of ways to get themselves back to Earth. They need a computer, and some of them talk during the nights, around the campfire, about making a semiconductor factory so they can make transistors and build their own computer. The practical cadet, the lead subject of the novel, knows it is futile to mine ores and assemble all the elements and factories to make a semiconductor fab and the smelters to extract various metals. He is opposed by the majority, the dreamers. He is attacked by an opponent, a martial arts expert, who is going to dispatch him, because the opponent can fight dirty while the hero is constrained to fight by the rules. I don't remember how this story turned out.
Space travelers in another star system experience a computer failure. The computer is vital to navigating back to Earth. They have enough supplies, fuel, air, and food, so that is not an immediate problem. But they have no computer for navigating back to Earth. They come up with a scheme to do the digital computations that are needed to navigate. They assemble a mechanical computer that resembles an abacus. With weeks of computation, they come up with a set of engine impulses and directions that will get them back to Earth.
An Earthling is exploring on an isolated mountain plateau (not in North America). He clambers over a ridge and looks down into a crater. He sees what he thinks is a large radio reflector dish, such as is used for radio astronomy. But there is an ominous sound coming from the contraption, and the explorer's senses are distorted by some sort of energy field. With difficulty, he gets nearer the machine and finds that it is beaming energy from Earth to another planet. He gets back to his companions and they discover there are numerous of the energy beaming installations, all over the Earth. They prepare bombs to sabotage the alien installations, and save the Earth.
All the great sic-fi novels were culled from libraries by the 1980s. I tried to find them in the 1980s and was disappointed to find none of the old, great novels.