Ancient Future History

April 12, 2009 9:21 AM

Continuing a long tradition of "Name this [whatever]," I'm trying to identify a science fiction story or series of stories published in Boy's Life Magazine in the mid-1960s.

I know this is ancient history, but the question has been growing on me lately and what Google-fu I have is ineffective. When I was a Cub Scout in the mid-60s I remember stories from Boy's Life magazine about a group of Scouts, living on a multi-generational starship that was approaching its destination. There is one story I remember distinctly, involving the Scouts in training for disembarking onto the destination planet, but it seems to me there was a more than one story in the series. Are there other baby boomers with similar memories of what the stories are and who wrote them?

posted by lhauser to media & arts (9 comments total)

I was a Cub Scout and received Boy's Life around the same time. Although I don't remember it specifically, it might have been a re-run of this.
posted by timsteil at 10:01 AM on April 12

I have very faint memories of that series. Weren't they on a solar sailcraft, propelled by solar winds?
posted by buggzzee23 at 10:20 AM on April 12

"The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" perhaps? From here:

"Now we come to the author who is most often given credit for introducing solar sails into science fiction: the great hard-SF writer, Arthur C. Clarke. His first story of solar sailing was published four years after "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" (in Boy's Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, March 1964). Originally titled "Sunjammer," the story is technically much more detailed than Cordwainer Smith's accounts. But its use of solar sails is rather less spectacular: instead of carrying thousands of settlers to new planets, the story's seven "sun yachts" engage in a competitive race from Earth orbit to the Moon. That gives Clarke the opportunity to describe half a dozen different designs for sailships, as well as complex strategies for maneuvering them during the race. The race itself is an exciting one, with collisions and cutthroat yachtsmanship, ending as one of the yachts accidentally becomes "the first of all man's ships to set sail on the long journey to the stars." "Sunjammer" was quickly reprinted in several publications in addition to Boy's Life (usually under the title "The Wind from the Sun"), so it gained much wider distribution than the Cordwainer Smith stories that preceded it. As Clarke himself later wrote, "Many of the bright men and women working to develop solar sails have told me that their lifelong interest began when they first read this story back in the 1960s."
posted by shinybeast at 11:55 AM on April 12

as followup, this might help track it down
posted by timsteil at 12:21 PM on April 12

"The Lady Who Sailed the Soul" is not the story that your quote is about, shinybeast. The wording is a bit weird but it's saying that Clarke's "Sunjammer" was published in the BSA magazine. However, "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul" IS an amazing story and it's available online here.
posted by bcwinters at 12:33 PM on April 12

Oops! I noticed that, but forgot to change it before posting. Thanks for the correction.
posted by shinybeast at 1:06 PM on April 12

ISFDb indexes a number of stories from Boys' Life, do any of these look familiar?

("Tramp Space Ship" caught my eye but it looks like it's a variant title for The Rolling Stones, which doesn't really fit your description.)
posted by hattifattener at 2:05 PM on April 12

How about this one?

"This book was originally serialized in "Boy's Life", the Boy Scouts of America magazine, which is why scouting finds its way into each chapter, but Heinlein makes excellent use of the concept..."

Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky
posted by shinybeast at 2:39 PM on April 12

There's no generation ship in Farmer in the Sky (it's set on Ganymede).
posted by hattifattener at 2:54 PM on April 12