I associate Neuromancer so strongly with the start of the 1990s, simply because that's when I read the book at the same time as being submerged into American computer and internet culture for the first time, that I still feel slightly shocked that Gibson wrote the book that long ago. But Tron was a year earlier. Plainly the ideas of a virtual or conceptual landscape, representing the abstract (and fearfully dispersed) entities of computing in a compact way that allowed easy interaction in a single contiguous space—a cyberspace, if you will—were already abroad in the popular imagination.
We were not equipped really to "get" this book at that time. In "real life" we'd yet to know real love or real loss. We read and re-read Neuromancer in a kind of uncomprehending fascination, which was probably how we consumed most media at the time—when you're dissociated all the time you don't always know why you do things. I'm glad we finally got back to it again; it's a good book. But it stirs up a disproportionate amount of pain and anger. Rage is thematic in Neuromancer—so it's fitting. Case had tried to get by on pure detachment, a sense of detachment he'd come by artificially, because he'd been a "console cowboy". Only slowly is he made to realize that his feelings still matter.
And that's another thing that we couldn't have yet grasped in the early 1990s: the unique allure of being made to feel, through some artificial and temporary means, a sense of timelessness and nigh-infinite space. Case got that through "jacking in", and he almost destroyed himself when that ability was taken away from him. We've had some slightly analogous experiences thanks to various drugs, and so we feel some echo of Case's pain: when you've had even a taste of that sense of limitlessness, the "real world" and material concerns become drab and cold indeed.
We could scarcely identify with any cismale protagonists in any of the fiction we consumed but Case is almost an exception, but I think that's simply because he's got so little personality. He's a nondescript whıte guy driven on by his compulsions; that's approximately what we thought we were in 199x. Even as an antihero Case is just a little boring and square, but Gibson did succeed in making me care about him. All the same, it's probably fitting that Case just vanishes from Gibson's fiction afterwards while Molly, who has oodles of personality and backstory, came back in later writings.
I hope Molly is still around somewhere, still managing to stay ahead of trouble. I wonder if she's ever run into Faye Valentine.
~Chara