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• 1 2016-05-16T16:15:07-07:00 "Rhythm" 4 plain 2016-05-18T12:49:42-07:00 Charles Cloukey’s “Rhythm”, appearing in the April 1930 edition of Amazing Stories describes a new and dastardly method of torture. “Rhythm” takes place on Earth in mid-1999, where the dictations of a will belonging to late, esteemed scientist leads to an attempt at dispatching the story’s protagonist in order to gain legal possession of the deceased’s secrets. The description of the short story credits ‘...the Chinese, ingenious in methods of torture’, as perfecting the agonizing effect of subjecting their victims to endless, mindless repetition, here aptly described as the well- known ‘Chinese water torture.’ Cloukey essentially projects a sort of odd futurism upon this Orientalist anxiety, creating a strange musical organ, or what the author calls the ‘rhythmic toy’ that is capable of producing lethal rhythms. The long, expository speech by the villain explains the trifling bit of science Cloukey layers the ‘toy’ with in order for this object to venture from mystic to mechanical: the human heart, the antagonist claims, has ‘...a strong tendency to beat in time with any well-marked rhythm.’ Therefore, playing a funeral march will elicit a sluggish demeanor while a military march will make on ‘patriotic’ and ‘energetic.’ The baddie commences his nefarious plot by torturing the heir to the coveted, scientific material as well as his accomplices, of course to no avail.
  
  Cloukey’s story does engage with a very real science behind music - and torture. Though not affecting the heart as Cloukey suggests in his story, music has a profound effect on human beings, both on a neurological level as well through social and cultural channels. The repetitive rhythms of Cloukey’s ‘rhythmic toy,’ is meant to drive its victims insane. Trapped inside of a soundproof room, the victims are forced to listen to the repetitive, though ultimately changing music of the device - unlike the forms of psychological torture that have used music, in which the means to an end is the blatant refusal to provide any form of sensory stimulation to the victim. Cloukey envisions the machine as inducing heart attacks upon its victims, not a psychosis brought on by deprivation. Cloukey tries to tie his contemporary understanding of science to an imagined, realistic future of his invention, where harming others becomes the impersonal business of machines, but without the use of direct, physical violence. Cloukey is not terribly far off track in his imaging of 1999, with the torture of political prisoners through music becoming fully realized a few short years later - a truly sad and rather disturbing prediction made by a mediocre sci-fi story from the 1930’s.