"Seventy-Two Letters" is a science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, published in June 2000 in the Ellen Datlow's anthology Vanishing Acts.
[4] The novella focuses on an alternate history of the world where science and technology are based on the use of golems and, accordingly, the Kabbalistic names embedded in them.
Greg Bitty of Strange Horizons wrote, ""Seventy-two Letters" is one of the finest representations of the SF subgenre of steampunk.
As the "-punk" suffix suggests, steampunk, like cyberpunk, is a neologism, describing a fairly coherent collection of works which first emerged in the late 1980s.
Chiang's work, like that of dominant authors of steampunk such as James Blaylock and Tim Powers, shares a pleasure in the game-like aspects of reworking known history; but Chiang transcends most works in the genre by starting his revision of history much earlier, reworking the entire industrial revolution in ways that manage to show us our world in new and startling ways.