That's pretty much my take on it. I read it at the last minute before voting, and it barely slipped into fifth place on my ballot, reasoning "The science is crap, but it's ambitious, it would be good to see a translated novel on the ballot, and if it pushes anything off the ballot it'll probably be a Puppy novel instead of anything better than it." But the more time passes, the more the flaws bug me, and I now regret nominating it; I intend to put it below No Award, by a hair.
Loonunit wants to qualify that the short-term and even medium-term stability she was snarking about are completely different animals from the sort of long-term stability questions than Liu Cixan is wrestling with here, and yeah: a planet could exist long-term in a system like this while being bounced around different orbits at irregular intervals. And determining that is a second- and third- and higher-order problem, and quite difficult.
One of many things that failed for me is: why do they want Earth? The VR mapped their experiences into human-understandable analogs, but do they really use H20 when they "hydrate"? From the sounds of it, they could survive anything from Mercury to Pluto - it's the stable single-sun system they want, and we've got lots of options.
"Interesting failure" -- that's a good way to put it. I'm glad I read it, and found some parts of it fascinating, but there was a lot that didn't work for me. Mostly I focused not on science, but on character motivations and some clunky plot construction.
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(Here, if you're interested: http://amysreviews.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-three-body-problem.html)
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