skopia
Rezzori rebuilds vanished Czernowitz, the eastern edge of the Habsburg world, through the five people who filled his childhood. His father hunts, his mother panics, and his nursemaid teaches him about death.
Franz Ferdinand Trotta drinks through the last spring of peace, then loses the war, his money and his wife. On the night Hitler annexes Austria he walks to the emperors' crypt.
Hari Seldon predicts the Galactic Empire's fall and thirty thousand years of darkness, then founds a colony to cut the wait to one thousand. Paul Krugman went into economics wanting Seldon's job.
A lieutenant knocks Emperor Franz Joseph off his horse at Solferino and saves his life. Three generations of Trottas ride that accident down into 1914, and the Habsburg empire dissolves around them.