Terra Nostra (novel) Terra Nostra (novel) Terra Nostra is a 1975 novel by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. The narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth". The novel received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1976 and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1977. "Terra Nostra", perhaps Fuentes' most ambitious novel, is a "massive, Byzantine work" that tells the story of all Hispanic civilization. Modeled on James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", "Terra Nostra" shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of
Solar System in fiction and that Mars could hardly support any macroscopic life forms on its surface, much less an advanced civilization. In the 1980s it was shown that the surfaces of Jupiter's moons were just as hostile to life. More recent fiction focused on the Solar System has thus tended to address its exploration for purposes such as terraforming, the engineering of planets for human habitation, than the possibility of any existing life. The following works or series use multiple planets and other locations within the Solar System as their primary settings: Solar System in fiction The Solar System and its various bodies