I believe that we process facts in a narrative. If you look at a bare fact, your mind automatically creates a narrative.

Murder rate 1%

22 Angstrom

Purple Burglar Alarm

That narrative takes place in a framing story.

'Science', among other things, is a very detailed framing story that modern society uses to evaluate facts.

An individual's framing story includes all of their history and biases and motivated reasoning and incentives and all the rest of the fallacies.

So yes, bad science is fiction, but even good science is narrative. If this feels wrong, go re-read a paper. Look at a figure or a sentence in the abstract. Your mind constructs a narrative.