Enigmatic Variations No. 1133: Peripheral Consequences by Jaques

[If you’re attending York S&B please see comments 32&33] - here

A smaller than average grid and a longer than average preamble greeted us this week. In fact, close reading of the preamble told us that the grid had a perimeter which needed filling and would end up being standard 13×13 fare.

It soon became clear that many of the entries had an extra letter either at the beginning or the end and was formed by a letter in the perimeter. Thus, the abundance of 3-letter entries turned out to be an abundance of 4-letter entries!

Each clue had an extra letter in its wordplay not entered in the grid. While the across extra letters seemed to be spelling out Unchecked something or other, the down clues’ extra letters seemed to be mostly consonants. Moreover, the quotation and author spelt out by the perimeter seemed to have too many gaps to make it easily solvable.

It wasn’t a particularly easy solve, but, when all the entries were finally in the grid and the extra letters identified, we were told that…

Unchecked border is T E M G S F L O T N V S B L I R T J B L A R

It took a little bit of fiddling to identify the starting point of all these unchecked letters, which included the corner squares. It was filling in the gaps of L·TE··URE in the top right corner that got it for me, and the perimeter finally revealed itself. This, together with the words which needed highlighting in the grid were from a quotation by J G BALLARD:

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact REALITY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

And so the margins of the puzzle, which were almost invisible, were finally revealed. Thanks to Jaques for celebrating the work of one of Britain’s best science fiction writers, JG Ballard 1930-2009.

Legend:
Definition in clue
X = Extra letters in wordplay
ABC* = anagram
ABC< = reversal
abCDef = hidden