"with large "sails" driven by solar wind "
IIRC the short story was called "The Wind from the Sun" but I've seen it re-titled as "Sunjammer," which I liked better.
Solar sailing both within a solar system and outside has been suggested. In principle it works best if you set up a "pipeline" of payloads going from A to B. It's slow but once you've mastered how to build large light sails (which IIRC was KE Drexlers Graduate thesis) it's relatively cheap in materials (10s of Kg of system pushes tonnes of payloads).
It's been suggested that sneaking up to a Sun behind an asteroid, then coming of it's shadow close in to the sun would give substantial (g's ) of acceleration which would bring it up to solar escape velocity.