Last fall, Amazon announced an upcoming Lord of the Rings TV adaptation, after purchasing the rights to JRR Tolkien’s fantasy series for a reported $200 million USD.

Now, according to Independent, the e-commerce giant is poised to add another massive asset to its lineup, and looking to compete against HBO's Game of Thrones, as Amazon is in talks to adapt the popular Chinese book series The Three-Body Problem into a three season TV series for a hefty price tag of $1 billion, reports Financial Times.

The Three-Body Problem is a 2008 sci-fi novel by Liu Cixin and it's about aliens preparing to invade Earth. The novel was both a best-seller and a huge critical success, and also got some high-profile praise last year from President Barack Obama, who called it "just wildly imaginative, really interesting... the scope of it was so immense."

The book's full synopsis is as follows:

"1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredicatable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces."

For additional details, be sure to read the full story on Independent.

In other Amazon news, the company is starting its own delivery service.