Amusing that this starts with a dismissal of the utility of fiction. Stories can be a powerful way of communicating subtle cultural artifacts and historical distinctions. Death of intellectual curiosity, indeed.
Remember that the focus of the article is on curiosity, not just on acquiring new information.
You can read about magical physics in science fiction books or you can read about real physics in science books. The later is much more interesting than the former, there is no comparison. There is a middle ground in PopSci, still not as interesting as real physics but better than science fiction books.
I am of the camp that real physics is far more interesting than fiction to me personally, and I crack open textbooks far more often than works of fiction.
However, I must opine that to say that fiction isn't as intellectually interesting compared to science probably speaks more to your own lack of understanding of the subject of fiction than to fiction itself.
Fiction is far from a settled science! There is tremendous room for creativity. Many competing mental models for how to compose a story, character, the prose itself, how literary themes should interact, etc. etc. What makes a best-seller different from a mediocre book? An endless number of things that can be dissected, experimented with and evolved.
And that's to say nothing about the concepts that can be toyed with through fiction and stories. Setting up a fictitious universe and exploring the consequences of that setup is not so different from asking the 'what if' questions assuming certain mathematical axioms or different sets of physical laws and symmetries.
It's hard to argue that books like The Da Vinci Code, as much I enjoy them, deliver the same sort of commentary on the human condition as something like 1984.
My point is that the author of the article was a criticizing a specific category of book, so any counter-argument against that criticism should also be specifically about that form. Just saying "fiction as a whole is valuable" seems both obviously true and not relevant to the discussion.
Which is a tautological statement since literary fiction is just a term snobs who don’t read fiction invented for “books that have special artistic merit so I’ll read them even if they’re fiction”.
I guess there is this line (emphasis mine), which is suggestive of all fiction but, to use your examples, I'm not convinced the author would attribute it to 1984 the same they would to The Da Vinci Code.
> There is nothing wrong with reading these kinds of books, but you do not learn anything new (besides who committed the murder).
Anything else is likely to be either sequels or dressed up leftovers and also-ran ideas.
As for Naruto running: let people have fun.