Except that in season 2 he didn’t know who Harry Mudd was.He must have arrived after Mudd’s Women, at least.
Of course, it would have made a lot more sense if it had been Sulu that found Khan.
Sergeant Detritus would have been perfect for the job.
Who the hell is Janet Kagen? 
Never heard of her.
She wrote Uhura’s Song, which I enjoyed quite a bit.
“Mudd’s Women” was episode no. 3 after the second pilot; “Space Seed” was number 24. So it is possible, though I personally have never cared for this explanation.
Or was used to help introduce quadrotriticale, for that matter! 
Aha! I’ll give it a read.
Not to mention a remarkable resemblance!
My goodness! I’d heard the UL, and believed it because they look kinda fakish. I apologize to the shade of Ricardo Montalban, may he reside joyously in the Elysian Fields of film history!
(It’s the plausible ULs that are the worst!)
Now I realize they had no way of knowing this at the time but between TWOK and TSFS they got the ships backwards. The Grissom, a lightly-armed science vessel (that can be one-shotted by a Klingon scout ship) should have been looking for Genesis-worthy test planets. The Reliant, a heavily-armed patrol ship that can go toe-to-toe with a Constitution-class, should have been guarding Genesis.
As for Khan I think Kirk did him a piece of mercy. The Federation is not particularly tolerant of augmented humans and has a habit of phasering them out of existence. I feel like Kirk’s actions in stranding Khan was actually a way of dropping the matter without the involvement of the Federation at large who probably would have said “it is the Captain’s discretion as to whether he should use a single torpedo or the full complement but we recommend a full complement for safety.”
Also, obligatory while we are on this subject:
Funny thing, Bobby from Taxi was on Babylon 5
And of course, we all remember Reverend Jim Klingontowski (TSFS)
As for the OP, yeah, he kind of did get a bad deal. But he WAS a war criminal. His arrangement with Kirk was likely swept under the rug, more or less. Pity about MacGuyver’s great great granddaughter. (She changed her name to McGivers to join Starfleet) She did jeopardize the ship (and all of humanity, really), tho…
Yeah, but George Takei was off filming The Green Berets, so Walter Koenig got Takei’s lines in The Trouble With Tribbles. But yeah, it made sense for Sulu to know about the quadrotriticale since he was a botanical expert.
… And at that point they could rarely afford to have them both in the same episode, anyway. 
Fun fact: Sulu was also supposed to be one of those taken captive in “Gamesters of Triskelion.” It would have been interesting to see him being seduced by the thrall with the orange hair…
That’s better.
Awfully convenient that Chekov remembered the name of Khan’s ship (for that dramatic moment when he realizes they’re in deep shit) but forgot which system they left Khan in (“Ceti Alpha? Nope, doesn’t ring a bell; let’s beam down.”).
For that matter, you’d think Starfleet might have made some sort of record for ships going to Ceti Alpha to exercise a little extra caution. Just a notation on the map “there be megalomaniacs here”, something.
You are all missing the big question. Why did the spacesuits have a handle on the front?
Hmm. It’s clear that you’re making a joke here.
But, for the record, in the current case, be it noted that the novelization of Star Trek II (and of Star Trek III, as well) was Hugo award-winner Vonda McIntire. I thought she did a pretty decent job in a task that is frequently dismissed as trivial, fleshing things out quite a bit. (Other Trek novelization writers include award winners like Joe Haldeman, his brother Jack, and Theodore Cogswell. The award-winning writer and critic James Blish did the novelizations for the TV series. I’ll let you make some nasty remarks about Alan Dean Foster, though, if you want to.
@ the OP:
I don’t think Khan had any reason to legitimately gripe about his and his people’s situation.
Kirk basically said: “You wanna be a master race, with power over billions? Well, here you go: your very own world. It can sustain human life, here’s some starter supplies out of your ship, so go, be a leader of your people, and build the kind of society you want.”
Khan and his people faced the same perils of natural disasters that the rest of humanity did in our “primitive” state.