Are there sci-fi stories with the premise that a character wakes up transported to a different planet except it’s later revealed that it’s actually Earth in a distant time?
It is by far, the best series I've read. Book 1 is hard to get into, and doesn't reward the reader as much, but stick with the series. It's worth it.
> And there was even a fear of dying before I could finish it! I remember being struck by a quote I read somewhere, when Robert Jordan was in his last few years, at a signing where he signed a book for an elderly woman who expressed a fear of her dying before he finished the series. And of course the bitter irony being Jordan himself dying before he could finish the series. And the closer I got to it, there was a disastrous decision to do some archaeology in Mongolia between books nine and ten, and then that almost killing me, from a stomach bug, and then a spider bite, it just started getting ridiculous. And then I realised if I keeled over in Mongolia between book nine and ten, wherever my gravestone was in the world people would annually piss on it, so I thought okay, I got to get this thing finished. And came back, I was living in Falmouth at the time, so I came back to Cornwall and just wrote my ass off and got it done.
Feels like a movie-length version of a classic Twilight Zone episode, which makes sense, considering Rod Serling wrote the first draft of the film's script.
Dialog is present and very famous, though. ("You maniacs! You blew it up!")
But yeah the river is a big hint. The Paraná in Argentina is a good candidate, and it’s easy to rule out other big delta rivers like the Nile or Mississippi. Iirc Severian also uses the word “pampas” for plains, and at some point we learn there’s a jungle zone to the north, with an arid region beyond.
Please be careful if you gonna read TV tropes page linked in a sibling comment, as the title of that episode is in the list of examples on that page in Live-Action TV section, so you can accidentally spoil yourself all the fun.