content: 
  ===Awards and honors===
  In 2016, FanSided named Ice and Fire Con as one of the top ten nerdiest vacation destinations.
  In 2017, NowThis News praised Ice and Fire Con in its "Game of Thrones - A Community of Ice and Fire" coverage for the event's "more intimate gathering that's more party than press conference", favorably comparing the Ice and Fire Con to the fan conventions Martin himself attended in the 1970s and 1980s as a fan and built the friendships that served him throughout his career.
  Linda Antonsson, Elio M. García and George R.R. Martin in 2015.
  Sweden-based fans Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson run one of the main ''Ice and Fire'' fansites, Westeros.org, which they established in 1999. The site had about 17 thousand registered members in 2012. Martin himself has checked with García (whom ''The New Yorker'' dubbed a "superfan" with encyclopedic knowledge of Martin's works) to confirm details of his own series, and has referred HBO researchers to García as well.
  The very first fan website and messageboard (as recounted by García, Antonsson, and Martin) was a site called "Dragonstone", which only lasted for about one year between the release of the first novel in 1996, and the site crashed in 1997, never to be rebuilt. The creator of "Dragonstone" moved on; however, several of the earliest online fans who had met on the site (Elio García among them) coalesced again to create Westeros.org.
  Though his work at Westeros.org is voluntary, García has been a paid consultant for licensed tie-in merchandise. García and Antonsson are Martin's coauthors of a companion book to the series, ''The World of Ice & Fire'' (2014). Martin had approached the pair about the project in 2008.