Now that the BSA has come to its senses, it just might be time to revisit the genre offerings published in the organization’s long-lived magazine – Boy’s Life.
We’ve long known that several Heinlein juvenovels originally appeared as serials within its pages; some may also be familiar with the seminal illustrations of lightsails prepared for Arthur C. Clarke’s story Sunjammer, or the illustrated version of Heinlein’s Between Planets that appeared on its pages. But while there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of SF published by Boy’s Life, there was a lot more than most are familiar with.
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an excellent entry on the subject that you can read right here. But perhaps the greatest aid in mining past pages can be found on the magazine’s own website, where they’ve created a Wayback machine that presents most (if not all) issues from 1911 on in PDF format.
You can find Blish’s The Star Dwellers, Henry Comstack’s The Crimson Ray and even a full run of the comic strip The Space Conquerers!
Here’s a gallery of image captures of just some of Boy’s Life SF to whet your appetite:
1 Comment