Reading Connections in Robopocalypse

After finishing Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, I started reading Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. The author has a degree from Carnegie Mellon University and has written several previous science fiction novels on articficial intellingence and robots. The story starts out as a war is ending, one between people and a robotic system that believes it needs to eliminate the human species to save the rest of the world. A soldier in this conflict, Cormac Wallace, compiles small bits of information for others in the future to know about the war. Each chapter of the book is a snippet of seemingly random information from different people that comes together with Wallace's commentary to tell the story of the war. This method of narration reminded me of a movie I have seen in which the story is told through a series of short scenes and does not make sense until the final explanation. So far, I have reached about 70% of the way through the book, and the different character's tales are slowly blending together. Even the narrator seems to have a much larger role in the plot than I originally realized.

The plot of Robopocalypse is very similar to how we learn about ancient history: in small fragments from a wide variety of sources. Each clue seems to tell a slightly different story, but when we put the pieces together, we can better underestand society in that point in history. Also, similar to how we learn important events that led to other things in more depth than other occurances, the narrator in the novel only writes about the most important people and their most important contributions, claiming he has little time and too much information to sort through.

Even though I am already more than halfway through the book, I still am not able to fully understand the story. I predict that all of the short stories' characters are linked in some way, and will meet up towards the end of the book to find and destroy Archos, the intelligent robotic system that is controlling machines around the world. I wonder though how Cormac Wallace obtained first hand accounts of several people around the world. He clearly couldn't have travelled so much himself, and been in multiple places at the same time. My best guess at this point in the story is that the data was being collected by Archos and was somehow restored to let Wallace use it.

Additionally, the plot structure of  Robopocalypse seemed to be inspired, and a much smaller scale version of another set of novels, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. These books cover thousands of years in an entire galaxy and do not have characters continue from one book to another, or even from one section of a book to the next. Instead, the individual stories are only connected by a single idea, giving only the reader the ability to know the entire story.

As a final note, I would currently reccomend reading Robopocalypse from what I have read so far, but I cannot give a complete review until I finish the book. Although the robots in the story seem complex and distant, they are really closer than we think.