I read A.M. Lightner’s The Day of the Drones (W.W. Norton, 1968) while doing research for my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Though I didn’t cite it, the book is notable for its reversal of races (“black is beautiful; white is taboo”) and gender roles. 

Lightner wrote several novels and many youth nonfiction nature books under her real name, Alice Lightner Hopf. Her naturalist knowledge shows in her depiction of a white society based on bees in The Day of the Drones.

I don’t remember how I even found this book, but Lightner’s work should be considered right up there with Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin.