Thriller writer Daniel Suarez has a lot of readers with important jobs.

Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s Media Lab, calls him “my favorite science-fiction writer” and said he’s shared Mr. Suarez’s work with “senior” people in the military. William O’Brien, former White House director of cybersecurity policy, says he has also shared Mr. Suarez’s novels about technology deployed for deeply dire purposes with colleagues in government and the intelligence community, where they have generated “appropriate dialogue about relevant issues.”

The high-powered readership is attracted by Mr. Suarez’s blend of compulsively page-turning suspense with plausible, just-around-the-corner technology. The 2006 novel “Daemon” describes lethal driverless cars and assassins outfitted with Google Glass-type goggles that help them track down victims. The 2012 book, “Kill Decision,” is swarming with inexpensive, automated drones that mine data and monitor social media to identify targets. In the course of his research, Mr. Suarez has become an expert on drones and has given a TED talk on the dangers to society of removing people from the “kill decision.”

“He has an uncanny ability to take bleeding edge, incredibly complex technologies and blend them into a fascinating story,” says Mr. O’Brien, the cybersecurity expert.

In “Influx,” due out Feb. 20, a sinister Bureau of Technology Control kidnaps scientists that have developed breakthrough technologies (the cure to cancer, immortality, true artificial intelligence), and is withholding their discoveries from humanity, out of concern over the massive social disruption they would cause. “We don’t have a perfect record—Steve Jobs was a tricky one—but we’ve managed to catch most of the big disrupters before they’ve brought about uncontrolled social change,” says the head of the bureau, the book’s villain. The hero has developed a “gravity mirror” but refuses to cooperate, despite the best efforts of Alexa, who has been genetically engineered by the Bureau to be both impossibly sexy and brilliant.

In the publishing world, there is a growing sense that “Influx,” Mr. Suarez’s fourth novel, may be his breakout book and propel him into the void left by the deaths of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. “Influx’ has Mr. Suarez’s largest initial print run, 50,000 copies, and Twentieth Century Fox bought the movie rights last month.

An English major at the University of Delaware with a knack for computers, Mr. Suarez started a consulting firm in 1997, working with companies like Nestlé on complex production and logistics-planning issues. “You only want to move 100 million pounds of sugar once,” says Mr. Suarez, 49 years old.

He began writing in his free-time. Rejected by 48 literary agents—(a database expert, he kept careful track)—he began self-publishing in 2006 under the name Leinad Zeraus, his named spelled backward. His sophisticated tech knowledge quickly attracted a cult following in Silicon Valley, Redmond, Wash., and Cambridge, Mass. The MIT bookstore was the first bookstore to stock his self-published books in 2007. Picking up on that buzz, literary-agent Bridget Wagner Matzie approached him and landed a publishing deal with Dutton in 2008. (She no longer represents Mr. Suarez.) “It took a lot of convincing to get him to go mainstream,” she said. “He said, ‘I want to write for my people. I don’t want to dumb it down.'” Mr. Suarez left the software consulting business and began writing full-time in 2007.

At times, a reader might beg for a little dumbing down. Some sample dialogue from “Influx:” “Yes, but the deBroglie wavelength of the BEC is on the order of a millimeter, whereas the gravity field wavelength is effectively infinite—which means gravity can move it around.”

Such highly technical passages “are constrained” to the beginning of “Influx,” says Mr. Suarez. He’s unapologetic and eager to establish his “bona fides” with the NASA scientists and gravity experts that he grills while writing his books. “People don’t need to understand every word. Hopefully, they follow along,” he says. “I’ve read one too many thrillers that had really horrible technology in them.”

Mr. Suarez says he got a certain amount of satisfaction when he was driven down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley in a Google driverless car, after getting many emails from readers saying that driverless cars were decades in the future. Still, despite his credibility as a futurist, he is more concerned with fostering debate about the impact of technology on society. The Edward Snowden revelations “show that the public has very little idea how technology is really used to wield power,” he says. His biggest concern, beyond the proliferation of low-cost drones “built to do terrible things,” is privacy. A second, far more secure Internet needs to be developed for critical interactions, he says. He also advocates a Bill of Rights 2.0 that gives people ownership of their personal data. “If your data is out there earning money for somebody, you should have a say in it.”

The public is just waking up to issues like how their cellphone can be used to track their activities, he says. “George Orwell would be flummoxed. ‘Let me get this straight: You pay every month for your tracking device?'”

Mr. Suarez remains a geek at heart. In a recent interview, he grew particularly animated describing the “water-cooled, three-screen” gaming computer he recently built. But his real passion was reserved for the tweaks he made on his HP netbook. “I pulled Windows off it and put on Ubuntu, a flavor of Linux. It’s a really good operating system. Now it just sips battery power.”