I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.
Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.
Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.
Sometimes, a writer 'character' is just a projection of a person who is writing the story, but not necessarily 'me.'
