Miesel sees the struggle against entropy as the common theme in Anderson's work, fantasy as well as science fiction. This struggle is often depicted in myth and symbolism, as in the struggle between law and chaos in Three Hearts and Three Lions or Operation Chaos . The struggles of the failing Roman or Terran empires can also be easily interpreted in this light. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the total entropy of any closed, i.e. isolated, system will tend to increase, always making the system more disordered. The Second Law does allow an object to decrease its entropy, but it requires that such a decrease be paid for by increasing the entropy of the object's surroundings.
Life can develop on the planet Earth, decreasing the entropy of the living matter.
However, that life is completely dependent on solar energy, and the total entropy of the solar system is increasing. From this point one can treat the entire Universe as a thermodynamically closed system, and apply the Second law on the largest possible scale. All forms of life, above all human beings, create order in the world, but that order is achieved by decreasing the order of the world around them. Eventually all human institutions must fail, all living things must die, and all matter must decay. This simple application of the laws of thermodynamics to the universe as a whole is not without controversy, especially when Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is considered.