I know that far too many scientists believe in the Goldilocks zone, and that for life to happen, the conditions need to be like Earth.Well, I dont believe conditions need to be like that on Earth, or a preferable distance away from a star for life to survive.
In one of Arthur Clarke's stories, he describes a form of life that might exist on a planet that orbits a far hotter star than our sun, burned to utter desiccation by intense blasts of ultraviolet and soft x-rays. On that planet (he wrote) that life existed as two-dimensional orderly patterns that etched themselves in the surfaces of rocks. Powered by the intense flood of energy all around them, they took a thousand years to complete a single thought... but they didn't care, they had billions of years ahead of them.
Sorry I don't remember what book. It may have been in Childhood's End, or in one of his novellas, like Against The Fall of Night.